A bunch of old Reagan hands got together this spring, a couple of months into the new administration, and reminisced about their old boss, now 90 and lost to Alzheimer's. They also took some shots at the new President. They were, Peggy Noonan reports, "in private merrily irreverent."

They told jokes. What was President George W. Bush's answer to a question about Roe v. Wade ? "Ah think it was the most important decision George Washington made when he crossed the Delaware." They repeated the judgment offered by Ronald Reagan's son-that Mr. Bush's only accomplishment in life had been to stop being a drunk. When Mr. Bush failed to praise Mr. Reagan sufficiently at a ceremony for a new aircraft carrier, Ms. Noonan had this thought: "I bet he wonders if his listeners aren't thinking, Yes, Reagan was the man your old man wasn't. "

The theme of Ms. Noonan's new Reagan scrapbook, captured in its title, is that Mr. Reagan's sterling character was the key to the greatness of his Presidency. The book's unspoken but nevertheless plain subtext is the inadequacy of Bill Clinton's character. Her last book, The Case Against Hillary Clinton , gave a withering polemical assessment of both Clintons: "Together they stand for one thing: maximum and uninterrupted power for the Clintons," she wrote. "What they want is self-advancement, and what fuels them is a sense of self-importance."

But, just as the old Reaganites' harmless if unfunny merriment now has about it a faint odor of treason, the gravitational pull of history has redirected Ms. Noonan's argument from the past toward the future. The question you think about while reading Ms. Noonan's book has nothing to do with Mr. Clinton. It is whether Mr. Bush-a man Ms. Noonan once considered, with fine understatement, as not "especially gifted or full of promise"-has it in him to lead us now.

In "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin separated writers and thinkers into two camps-those who know one big thing (the hedgehogs) and those who know many things (the foxes). Dostoyevsky was a hedgehog; James Joyce was a fox. In this calculus, Mr. Reagan was a hedgehog, which in political terms means he was an ideologue. Mr. Clinton is a fox. Mr. Bush, one fears, belongs to neither category.

What was attractive about Mr. Reagan, aside from his avuncular affability, was his hedgehog's consistency of purpose. He favored smaller government and free markets, and he opposed communism. He said so, and he generally followed through. That sort of straightforwardness is rare in a politician, and Ms. Noonan is right to praise it.

Ms. Noonan, a former speechwriter for Mr. Reagan, is one of the great popular political writers of her generation. She sometimes displays astonishing rhetorical skill. Her writing is fluid, lively and varied, and rooted in an American idiom that runs back to at least Emerson. Occasionally you read a Noonan sentence twice, to appreciate how she sculpted it. Though some of her recent newspaper work has tended toward the sycophantic, the sentimental and the loopy, I expected a lot from this book.

It turns out to be little more than a mash note, something for the souvenir shop at the Reagan library. She has a crush on the old man. He used to collect anecdotes to support views he already held, and she does the same. She has pulled together countless stories of Mr. Reagan's authenticity, toughness and humanity, and she recounts them with a sing-song quality suitable to a fable or to Sunday school. They strike me as rather less reliable than Edmund Morris' biography of Mr. Reagan, Dutch , and Mr. Morris was making things up. In a way, Ms. Noonan admits as much. "I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him," she writes. The problem is partly one of definition. People will, Ms. Noonan concedes, "tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy." Ms. Noonan, of course, would not be the one to suggest that the former category of character flaw helped protect Mr. Reagan from the latter, admittedly more serious kind.

When Character Was King is a pastiche: some straight, familiar biography, some firsthand reporting, quite a few fairly raw, uninteresting interviews and some long speeches, including one that drags on for eight pages. An entire chapter is devoted to the jokes Mr. Reagan used to tell. Ms. Noonan explains away their uniform lameness: "Wit penetrates, and humor envelops." Her old boss, she concedes, did not penetrate. The point seems to be that humor need not be funny if its social function is to share with the listener an amiable informal experience, a simulacrum of ease and intimacy. Reminds me of those Reader's Digest "Life in These United States" columns.

Ms. Noonan is desperate to show that Mr. Reagan was a thinker, an intellectual. She builds her case from the fundamentals, demonstrating first that he could read and write. She quotes some dreadful high-school juvenilia, and she tells us that his later work-radio talks, speeches-had "the smoothness of a simple stream." The evidence presented here makes the case for "simple." Aiming higher, she boasts about the books she saw on a visit to the now-vacant Reagan ranch-Allen Drury, Winston Churchill, Whittaker Chambers, Horatio Alger-and asserts that Mr. Reagan "read up here. He'd be out all day and come in at five, before dinner, and sit in his favorite chair in the porch room."

She blames Nancy Reagan for some of her husband's intellectual limitations. Mrs. Reagan "was not deep and did not pretend to be." She "was more like a Republican than a conservative." (Here is the difference, according to an unnamed friend of Ms. Noonan's: "Democrats respect books because they respect ideas. Conservatives respect books because they respect ideas. Republicans respect money.") There's something disquieting about the nastiness Ms. Noonan once directed at Hillary Clinton and now, in this new book, directs at Mrs. Reagan-something misogynistic and perhaps even self-loathing. She tells us that Mrs. Reagan was tense and "looked like an aging movie star. So you add tense to movie star and you get Evita." She tells us how much she admired an acid 1968 Joan Didion profile of Mrs. Reagan in the Saturday Evening Post ; it was "a startling piece, beautifully observed and quite deadly." Ms. Noonan had lunch with Mrs. Reagan last year, and she thought to raise the subject of the 30-year-old magazine article. "Things like the Joan Didion piece years ago really hurt you, didn't they?" she asked. To this faux sympathy, Mrs. Reagan replied, "Oh, she was mean." Then she added, "That was mean." Perhaps she was still thinking about Ms. Didion; perhaps not.

George W. Bush gave Ms. Noonan an interview for her book in June. She tried to draw him out about Ronald Reagan; she does the President no favors by reproducing, over several pages, his tentative, disconnected riffs. But Mr. Bush also talked about his famous meeting with Vladimir Putin and the criticism of the President's over-the-top enthusiasm for his new soulmate, the K.G.B. thug. Mr. Bush defended himself: "I have pretty good instincts," he told Ms. Noonan, "and I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism."

That was, as I said, back in June, not long after Ms. Noonan's pals were having some fun at the President's expense.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

A bunch of old Reagan hands got together this spring, a couple of months into the new administration,and reminisced about their old boss, now 90 and lost to Alzheimer's. They also took some shots at the new President. They were, Peggy Noonan reports, "in private merrily irreverent."

They told jokes. What was President George W. Bush's answer to a question about Roe v. Wade ? "Ah think it was the most important decision George Washington made when he crossed the Delaware." They repeated the judgment offered by Ronald Reagan's son-that Mr. Bush's only accomplishment in life had been to stop being a drunk. When Mr. Bush failed to praise Mr. Reagan sufficiently at a ceremony for a new aircraft carrier, Ms. Noonan had this thought: "I bet he wonders if his listeners aren't thinking, Yes, Reagan was the man your old man wasn't. "

The theme of Ms. Noonan's new Reagan scrapbook, captured in its title, is that Mr. Reagan's sterling character was the key to the greatness of his Presidency. The book's unspoken but nevertheless plain subtext is the inadequacy of Bill Clinton's character. Her last book, The Case Against Hillary Clinton , gave a withering polemical assessment of both Clintons: "Together they stand for one thing: maximum and uninterrupted power for the Clintons," she wrote. "What they want is self-advancement, and what fuels them is a sense of self-importance."

But, just as the old Reaganites' harmless if unfunny merriment now has about it a faint odor of treason, the gravitational pull of history has redirected Ms. Noonan's argument from the past toward the future. The question you think about while reading Ms. Noonan's book has nothing to do with Mr. Clinton. It is whether Mr. Bush-a man Ms. Noonan once considered, with fine understatement, as not "especially gifted or full of promise"-has it in him to lead us now.

In "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin separated writers and thinkers into two camps-those who know one big thing (the hedgehogs) and those who know many things (the foxes). Dostoyevsky was a hedgehog; James Joyce was a fox. In this calculus, Mr. Reagan was a hedgehog, which in political terms means he was an ideologue. Mr. Clinton is a fox. Mr. Bush, one fears, belongs to neither category.

What was attractive about Mr. Reagan, aside from his avuncular affability, was his hedgehog's consistency of purpose. He favored smaller government and free markets, and he opposed communism. He said so, and he generally followed through. That sort of straightforwardness is rare in a politician, and Ms. Noonan is right to praise it.

Ms.Noonan,a former speechwriter for Mr. Reagan, is one of the great popular political writers of her generation. She sometimes displays astonishing rhetorical skill. Her writing is fluid, lively and varied, and rooted in an American idiom that runs back to at least Emerson. Occasionally you read a Noonan sentence twice, to appreciate how she sculpted it. Though some of her recent newspaper work has tended toward the sycophantic, the sentimental and the loopy, I expected a lot from this book.

It turns out to be little more than a mash note, something for the souvenir shop at the Reagan library. She has a crush on the old man. He used to collect anecdotes to support views he already held, and she does the same. She has pulled together countless stories of Mr. Reagan's authenticity, toughness and humanity, and she recounts them with a sing-song quality suitable to a fable or to Sunday school. They strike me as rather less reliable than Edmund Morris' biography of Mr. Reagan, Dutch , and Mr. Morris was making things up. In a way, Ms. Noonan admits as much. "I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him," she writes. The problem is partly one of definition. People will, Ms. Noonan concedes, "tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy." Ms. Noonan, of course, would not be the one to suggest that the former category of character flaw helped protect Mr. Reagan from the latter, admittedly more serious kind.

When Character Was King is a pastiche: some straight, familiar biography, some firsthand reporting, quite a few fairly raw, uninteresting interviews and some long speeches, including one that drags on for eight pages. An entire chapter is devoted to the jokes Mr. Reagan used to tell. Ms. Noonan explains away their uniform lameness: "Wit penetrates, and humor envelops." Her old boss, she concedes, did not penetrate. The point seems to be that humor need not be funny if its social function is to share with the listener an amiable informal experience, a simulacrum of ease and intimacy. Reminds me of those Reader's Digest "Life in These United States" columns.

Ms. Noonan is desperate to show that Mr. Reagan was a thinker, an intellectual. She builds her case from the fundamentals, demonstrating first that he could read and write. She quotes some dreadful high-school juvenilia, and she tells us that his later work-radio talks, speeches-had "the smoothness of a simple stream." The evidence presented here makes the case for "simple." Aiming higher, she boasts about the books she saw on a visit to the now-vacant Reagan ranch-Allen Drury, Winston Churchill, Whittaker Chambers, Horatio Alger-and asserts that Mr. Reagan "read up here. He'd be out all day and come in at five, before dinner, and sit in his favorite chair in the porch room."

She blames Nancy Reagan for some of her husband's intellectual limitations. Mrs. Reagan "was not deep and did not pretend to be." She "was more like a Republican than a conservative." (Here is the difference, according to an unnamed friend of Ms. Noonan's: "Democrats respect books because they respect ideas. Conservatives respect books because they respect ideas. Republicans respect money.") There's something disquieting about the nastiness Ms. Noonan once directed at Hillary Clinton and now, in this new book, directs at Mrs. Reagan-something misogynistic and perhaps even self-loathing. She tells us that Mrs. Reagan was tense and "looked like an aging movie star. So you add tense to movie star and you get Evita." She tells us how much she admired an acid 1968 Joan Didion profile of Mrs. Reagan in the Saturday Evening Post ; it was "a startling piece, beautifully observed and quite deadly." Ms. Noonan had lunch with Mrs. Reagan last year, and she thought to raise the subject of the 30-year-old magazine article. "Things like the Joan Didion piece years ago really hurt you, didn't they?" she asked. To this faux sympathy, Mrs. Reagan replied, "Oh, she was mean." Then she added, "That was mean." Perhaps she was still thinking about Ms. Didion; perhaps not.

George W. Bush gave Ms. Noonan an interview for her book in June. She tried to draw him out about Ronald Reagan; she does the President no favors by reproducing, over several pages, his tentative, disconnected riffs. But Mr. Bush also talked about his famous meeting with Vladimir Putin and the criticism of the President's over-the-top enthusiasm for his new soulmate, the K.G.B. thug. Mr. Bush defended himself: "I have pretty good instincts," he told Ms. Noonan, "and I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism."

That was, as I said, back in June, not long after Ms. Noonan's pals were having some fun at the President's expense.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

There will be only three New York City newspapers that matter a couple of years from now, according to James Duffy's entertaining comic novel about the downfall of our next Mayor. One is The Times , thank goodness, which will remain "restrained and fair." The second will be called The Post-News –a merger of the two tabloids. That name is the occasion for some amusing swipes from Mr. Duffy, including the observation that one might see "'postnews' as a subset of postmodernism." But the real player in town will be an "irreverent weekly newspaper, The Surveyor ," which manages to be "hip, jazzy and crusading," all at the same time–and all for a dollar. This town could use a paper like that.

The Surveyor , it emerges, is the engine that makes the city run. The book opens with one of those Park Avenue dinner parties at which all important urban affairs are apparently decided. The editor of The Surveyor is there, naturally. He and the other guests, in jest at first and then in earnest, propose to support a Columbia professor named Eldon Hoagland for Mayor. He's an expert in urban affairs and is smart, thoughtful, witty and decent to boot–which is to say he'd be a terrible Mayor, and has shortcomings as the central character in a novel, too.

Once Hoagland agrees to run, The Surveyor comes "to resemble a campaign handbill with its lavish praise of the dream candidate." He wins, having campaigned on "sensible, innovative, incremental programs for enriching education, creating jobs and jump-starting the city's economy." Hey, it's a novel. And just to confirm it's a fantasy, Mr. Duffy has the press collectively buy "the line that the new mayor was a class act and that the city was the beneficiary of a sort of meritocratic noblesse oblige."

Mr. Duffy has Hoagland reflect on what made him run: "A sense of duty? Yes, that was it. Princeton in the Nation's Service: Woodrow Wilson '79, Adlai Stevenson '22, Eldon Hoagland '54." Mr. Duffy, it will not surprise you to learn, is a Princeton man, too ('56).

Hoagland does have a flaw: He likes to get together with a college crony every once in a while and get plastered. The aftermath of such an evening sets the book's plot in motion. Mr. Duffy concocts a suitably absurd little scandal involving a dog, firearms and a cover-up. The key incident, which involves gunplay, happens before midnight on Fifth Avenue around 62nd Street, and the reader must accept that there was no one around to take note. Mr. Duffy must get to bed early.

He may be a little fatigued: After practicing corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore for 30 years, he has done quite a bit of writing. Mr. Duffy is the author of a series of mysteries under the pen name Haughton Murphy; they feature a genteel, retired corporate lawyer and amateur sleuth named Reuben Frost and bear titles like Murders and Acquisitions .

This is Mr. Duffy's first novel under his own name. He knows his way around New York City's establishment and curious political landscape. He is a fluid and lively writer, which is a good thing, because he has chosen a difficult genre for this quasi-debut. The comic novel of contemporary politics and manners is a hell of a tough thing to pull off. Mr. Duffy aims for a middle ground between the assertively transgressive Tom Wolfe of The Bonfire of the Vanities and the lighter, jokier novels of Christopher Buckley.

Mr. Duffy strays into Wolfe territory in his vivid and decidedly politically incorrect portrayals of a Native American socialite, her Albanian dog-walker and lover, and various other minor characters of one and another ethnicity. But it's not clear that his heart is in it. He lacks Mr. Wolfe's fiery disdain, and there is something rote and almost required about the stereotyping. It's as though a certain kind of satire requires the offhand ethnic put-down to show its independence from the ruling orthodoxies.

Mr. Duffy does exhibit an entirely earnest appreciation for the "old New York names and possessors of old money," who do not receive the civic attention accorded to "members of more vocal and conspicuous minorities."

But Mr. Duffy doesn't really lay into, say, the figure of Artemis Payne, his black Public Advocate, except to note that he "graduated from City College and Cardozo Law School" and had "never succeeded in developing a practice that prospered, a hard task for any lawyer without a staff of junior lawyers and paralegals." Coming from a Princeton and Harvard Law man, and a former Cravath partner, that's tough stuff.

The book might have benefited from a little less coyness. Names are changed or omitted for no especially good reason. A little reality might have grounded the farce in a closer approximation of our world. In discussing the term-limit law that gives Hoagland his shot, for instance, Mr. Duffy notes that it was "enacted through the efforts and expenditures of a wealthy 'civic reformer' who mistakenly thought that shorter terms for incumbents would eventually give him a chance for elective office." The reference is plainly to Ronald S. Lauder; was there a reason not to say so?

Similarly, the slightly too-good-to-be-true Hoagland talks about a former Mayor who can only be Rudolph W. Giuliani: "Don't forget," he tells the police commissioner, "I promised in the campaign that City Hall would no longer be the Kremlin, as my beloved predecessor had made it. And I said we'd get rid of all the fascist gimmicks he used to suppress dissent. Remember?"

Dog Bites Man is punctuated with mock newspaper articles set off in boldface. While Mr. Duffy's ear for newspaper writing is not always perfect, the device is diverting and sometimes moves the story forward in surprising ways. The Surveyor leads the attack against Hoagland, causing a reporter there to muse about the vagaries of the newspaper business: "Shamelessly boosting Eldon Hoagland for months and then turning on him when the chance for a hot headline came along–is that what journalism was about?" Some questions answer themselves.

Fueled by a more-than-ample supply of plot, the book chugs along. The narrative sometimes seems a little too brisk and linear, and you appreciate the moments when Mr. Duffy pauses to give a fuller sense of an occasion. On benefit dinners, for instance: "Their banal sameness was predictable: an execrable dinner in a badly ventilated hotel ballroom, hackneyed and overlong speeches extolling the honoree of the evening (read: a successful C.E.O. whose corporation had taken two or three pricey tables to support the sponsoring charity)." Albany, he writes, is "the snowbound Brasilia." A low-wattage politician is "an appreciative dais sitter."

The denouement of Dog Bites Man is the product, of all things, of various statutes entirely of a piece with the over-the-top goings-on in the rest of the book. I was sure they were fanciful creations of a retired lawyer's imagination, and rather admired Mr. Duffy's craft in drafting them. But since Mr. Duffy went so far as to provide fake-sounding citations–just the thing to keep the comedy humming!–the dutiful reviewer went and checked. Suffice it to say that Mr. Duffy has here overcome his coyness.

It turns out that Section 353 of the Agriculture and Markets Law does allow prosecution of anyone who "causes, procures or permits" the killing of an animal, which is not so surprising unless you're a butcher or a hunter. But did you know that Section 371 of that same law allows the ASPCA to perform arrests? Better still, did you know that Section 33 of the State Public Officers Law allows the Governor to remove mayors essentially at will? Do you suppose Governor Pataki has ever been tempted?

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

You've seen the picture, in a dorm room, perhaps, or a coffee-table book. And you've paused, because it is extraordinary to contemplate Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley in the same place, in the same historical moment, in the same frame, shaking hands.

Nixon looks a little confused and put out, and Elvis looks glassy and drugged up. They both have faraway looks, but for different reasons. Nixon's mind is on other things, probably war crimes. Elvis is there to become, of all things, a federal agent in the war against drugs. It is Dec. 21, 1970. Elvis is well into his fat phase, a lurid spectacle in a purple crushed-velvet suit with a caped jacket, bell bottoms and a mighty gold belt that might as well be a corset.

Why should a meet-and-greet photo-op handshake shot have such iconic power?

Why is the image, as an aide at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., put it, "our most popular photo that has ever been"? It has something to do with the dual portrait's Warholesque flatness, the way it busts straight through irony and then camp to become an affectless and unfathomable document of pure vortex celebrity. It was, the Presley scholar Vernon Chadwick said, "like the docking of two spaceships."

But there is historical context, too, and that must have been what set Jonathan Lowy to thinking that the visit could be a springboard for his first novel. He closely tracks the available record (which is richer than you might think) on Elvis' travel to and time in Washington, and he adds a number of minor characters and subplots.

There is a lot of business involving Elvis' good-old-boy cronies, who are frantic with greed when the King goes missing. And there are converging stories involving Watergate-style covert operations. One has to do with a Vietnam veteran from the ghetto who rejects a medal at a White House ceremony and gets his comeuppance, the other has to do with a bureaucrat's son returned from the My Lai massacre. Both nicely capture the grim conspiratorial tone of the late-Cold War era. Mr. Lowy, who is a lawyer, is at his very best in a scene in which a lawyer advises a potential witness on how to handle his role in the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley, who orchestrated the massacre. The lawyer's methodical and cynical review of actual testimony from the proceeding is dark matter, indeed.

Mr. Lowy's most valuable contribution, though, is what you might call the background music. His novel conveys a fully realized sense of the nasty, paranoid fever dream of a time when Nixon was ascendant and the Woodstock era was already over, only a few seasons after the Summer of Love.

Elvis' trip from Graceland to the White House is presented as a sort of epic journey, an impulse which probably owes something to the author's degree in folklore and mythology from Harvard College. (His thesis: "Elvis as a Hero of the Global Village.") Thus, Mr. Lowy has Elvis think this as he sets out from Graceland: "Quest. I'm not escaping; that's not it. I'm searching. But for what? What in God's name am I looking for?" His limo driver in Washington is Channa, which was the name of Siddharta's charioteer. The whole book is a strange admixture of high myth and Buddhism delivered in cornpone dialect.

Last year, in a collection of essays called Double Trouble , Greil Marcus made the case for parallels between the appetites, ambitions and talents of the young Elvis and Bill Clinton. Mr. Lowy explores a set of darker and, in many ways, more resonant echoes and shadows in Elvis and Nixon . By 1970, the President and the pop star were both in the early stages of self-destruction, both driven by inordinate hostility toward and alienation from the counterculture and an unhealthy fascination with freelance law enforcement. And yet, for both of them, the youth culture was a necessary adversary, the dark twin, the backing on the mirror. "Defeat the enemy," Mr. Lowy has the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman say, "and we defeat ourselves."

Though they get equal billing in the title, the central presence in Elvis and Nixon is Elvis: Much of the novel is presented from his perspective, with his consciousness streaming.

Elvis views the hippies and radicals with intense suspicion, though he saves his deepest loathing for rock music itself. ("Where the hell," Mr. Lowy's Elvis thinks, "were the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and his woman lips and the Rolling Stones when Elvis had shaken things up to create the world?") All of this is mixed with the piercing resentment Elvis feels from blacks. "There was the money thing–you got it, we don't–and there was the old slavery thing, the Civil War thing, the southern thing, all that black and white angry crap. But there was something else, Elvis felt, at the core of the rage, a special anger for Elvis. It was this: You stole our music, you white bastard ."

Elvis is jammed up, then, between a past in which he has come to be viewed as an interloper, a thief, and a future in which he is irrelevant and–soon enough–a punch line. Mr. Lowy puts a lot of weight on the King, but in his way, he can take it. He is a pathetic, slurring pharmaceutical cocktail in human form, yes, but not without soul. Mr. Lowy lets us know that Elvis "was obsessed with the theosophical and religious writings of Madame Blavatsky," and he has created lots of rants and riffs reflecting this. These harangues add depth to what could otherwise have been a tiresome and simple character, but they suffer from a kind of verbal bloat.

And I'm not sure I'm prepared to take Mr. Lowy's word for it when he mentions, in passing, that Elvis dipped into The Tibetan Book of the Dead from time to time, or that he was "Confucius on pills."

You may prefer the more straightforward delusions of the Elvis who wants a federal badge so people will stop bothering him about all of his damn guns. "There's a damned near revolution out there," Elvis thinks, "hell-bent on breaking out any instant, those damned Beatles leading the charge–America needs a superhero, part Dirty Harry, part James Bond, part J. Edgar Hoover and George Wallace combined; a powerful man versed in espionage, undercover work."

Mr. Lowy's Nixon is the familiar one. His patter and monologues are lifted from the White House tapes, or might as well be. The distinctive, disjointed, profane staccato is by now drained of some of its power to shock, but not to fascinate. There is a lovely set piece with Nixon and an underling on the White House lawn, with Nixon ranting about Vietnam and the press, and then movingly reminiscing about the humiliation of acting as a driver for Pat Nixon and her dates.

Mr. Lowy appropriates quite a bit of historical documentation, including Billy Graham's war commentary ("We've all had our My Lais one way or another"), the priceless letter from Elvis seeking the famous meeting ("I have done an in-depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist Brainwashing Techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing") and a memo from Dwight Chapin, the President's appointments secretary, pitching the meeting to H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff. "If the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside of the Government," Mr. Chapin wrote, "Presley might be a perfect one to start with." Mr. Haldeman's reaction, a comment too perfect for fiction, is scrawled in the margin: "You must be kidding."

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

The goofy centerpiece of this book is a

series of 10 tables ranking and sorting the top 500 or so public intellectuals by mentions in the media, on the Web and in scholarly work. Richard A. Posner, a distinguished federal appellate judge and the subject of an expert takedown in The New Yorker recently, uses the tables to add a little science–complete with regression analyses and comically complicated algebraic formulas–to his attack on extracurricular academic opining. He has little to say about how he decided which names belonged in these tables, though he concedes that he made some rough-and-ready cuts: Newt Gingrich, George Soros and Maureen Dowd are left out; William Kristol, Gloria Steinem and Pauline Kael are included. So much for science.

Mr. Posner's tables aren't very different from "The Observer 500," this newspaper's survey of celebrities mentioned in the gossip columns–which is to say they're delicious. Who can resist the numerical ranking of famous human beings?

The top public intellectual by media mentions in the last five years turns out to be Henry Kissinger, followed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Sidney Blumenthal comes in seventh, which of course undermines the entire enterprise. While Mr. Blumenthal has published serious books, his recent "media mentions" relate to the Clinton scandals and his failed libel suit against Matt Drudge. Judge Posner himself shows up at No. 70, behind Timothy Leary (28) and Ezra Pound (60), but ahead of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (72), Ann Coulter (74) and Albert Camus (76).

The tables categorize people in various ways, including by sex, politics and government service. They are also divided into the categories of Jewish and not, though I couldn't figure out how the judge was able to decide. He draws some conclusions from the data: for instance, "the heavy overrepresentation of Jews among prominent public intellectuals"–at 43 percent–"is no doubt related to their overrepresentation in the media and in academia, and perhaps specifically to the fact that Jews' verbal IQ is especially high relative to that of other groups" (his emphasis). The statistics also show that "as between a relatively more prominent white male or Jewish public intellectual and a relatively less prominent black or female or non-Jewish public intellectual, the media tend to choose the latter."

The balance of Public Intellectuals is a more traditional polemic. It grew out of Judge Posner's disenchantment with the quality of academic commentary on the recent impeachment and election debacles.

On Nov. 10, 2000, for instance, three days after the Presidential election, a group called the Emergency Committee of Concerned Citizens 2000 published a full-page advertisement in The New York Times . Among the signatories were quite a few big-name legal scholars, historians and philosophers, including Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, Cass Sunstein, Michael Walzer and Sean Wilentz. They argued that "there is good reason to believe that Vice President Gore has been elected President by a clear constitutional majority of the popular vote," and they suggested that new elections should be held in Palm Beach County, home of the butterfly ballot.

The quality of the evidence and reasoning in that ad and similar public statements drives Judge Posner nuts. In Breaking the Deadlock , his book on the 2000 election, he noted that the phrase "constitutional majority of the popular vote"–given that the popular vote in a Presidential election has no constitutional significance whatever–is "gibberish." And, he continued, the suggested revote, which was almost immediately abandoned by most of its proponents, would have been unlawful, impractical and unfair. Judge Posner blamed some of the poor quality of the debate on "the politicization of academic constitutional law," but that, he wrote, is "a topic for another day."

Now that day has come. In Public Intellectuals , Judge Posner returns to the Nov. 10 ad and notes that "the academic signatories, none of whom is an expert in election law," could not have "formulated a responsible academic opinion in the few hours that elapsed between the emergence of the 'crisis' and the composition of the advertisement."

Doubtless true. What's amusing about the judge's statement is that he, for one, apparently is able, in the book-publishing equivalent of hours, to toss off the definitive account of this or that knotty politico-legal crisis, even as he cranks out longer books surveying entire disciplines. Depending on how you're counting, Public Intellectuals is Judge Posner's sixth book in the last year. He also churns out an alarming number of law-review articles, along with essays and criticism for more popular publications. He was in the December Atlantic Monthly , for instance, on reconciling civil liberty and security in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

He writes faster than you can read. And he's a public intellectual in the specialized sense he describes and decries in this book: a "critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern." In other words, as he himself admits, in this book he's something of an intellectual suicide bomber: "I am aware that the arrows I shoot may curve in flight and hit the archer."

Judge Posner's main argument is that "public intellectuals are often careless with facts and rash in prediction." They lack, moreover, "insight or distinction, the filling of some gap in intellectual space." Larissa MacFarquhar's New Yorker profile made essentially the same charge against him. Judge Posner, she wrote, is "more attracted to rhetoric than to proof" and is not "very interested in the sort of prudent rigor that produces watertight logic." This is part overstatement and part half-truth: Judge Posner's writing is indeed limpid and muscular, but it's grounded (the celebrity-intellectuals tables notwithstanding) in substantial evidence carefully marshaled into showy and sometimes pedantic footnotes. His conclusions follow from his fully disclosed, if controversial, analytical methodology.

And consider the competition, which is no longer Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. or George Orwell or Edmund Wilson, but rather, typically, a tenured academic writing outside of his field and depth. Judge Posner attributes almost all of the decline of public intellectual life to the modern university: the specialization it requires, its generally leftist politics, the absence of literary distinction in its conventional discourse, its lack of worldliness, its embrace of the extreme or novel position. He is critical, too, of the journals that quote and publish these academics, both for assuming that credentialed knowledge in one area translates into general expertise and for welcoming the controversialist over the sensible moderate.

There is in fact no pressing societal need for the pronouncements of specialized experts on matters of general importance. As Judge Posner notes, "journalists, some with law degrees, presented generally lucid and accurate explanations of the issues and procedures in the avalanche of litigation precipitated by the closeness of the vote in Florida, even though they were working under great time pressure." The pronouncements of public intellectuals on the same subject were often, on the other hand, "shoddy or even wacky."

In An Affair of State (1999), his book on the impeachment of President Clinton, Judge Posner wrote that "an unkind critic might describe the signing by intellectuals of petitions, open letters, and full-page ads as a form of herd behavior." His description in the new book of the habits of that herd makes for an uneven but forceful and entertaining polemic. In the earlier book, he captured in a phrase the idea he has now expanded on for over 400 pages: Public intellectuals display a herd instinct because they're all the same type of animal–"the animal that likes to see its name in print."

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

hopgirl , by Steve Martin. Hyperion, 130 pages, $17.95.

We doubt the dabblers, the dilettantes–and that goes double for celebrities. Who can take completely seriously the actor who wants to direct, the singer who wants to be a movie star? We raise an eyebrow, we exchange knowing looks: We condescend to the ambitions of people of enormous talent.

Eric Bogosian and Steve Martin are performers, of course, but they are also writers. Mr. Bogosian has written not only the solo performances that are the core of his work but also three pretty good plays, two of which were turned into movies from his screenplays. Mr. Martin has written screenplays and a play of his own, and he writes trifles–"casuals"–for The New Yorker that seem to have found an audience. There ought to be nothing inherently suspect, then, about these two famous folk taking stabs at long-form fiction.

But both men struggle palpably in making the transition from essentially oral forms to full-blown narrative. Each writes perfect-pitch dialogue and makes sharp observations, but that's not enough to make a good novel. Only Mr. Bogosian manages, after a fitful start, to breathe life into his fictional world. Mr. Martin's book is stillborn.

Mall , Mr. Bogosian's novel, opens with a series of character sketches very reminiscent of his solo stage work. There and here, his characters scare us with their intensity, which is the Bogosian genius. Wariness and fear displace our usual reactions–pity, sympathy, laughter–to people at the margins of modern life. We meet his characters' rage with terror and hate of our own, and this surprises and distresses us.

Mr. Bogosian introduces the novel's protagonists one by one. They are trying by any means available to move off the catatonic suburban grid. You fear, in the book's early pages, that each will be merely a type, a symbol for a vice–crystal meth, or acid, or sexual transgression, or megaviolence. And you fear that Mr. Bogosian will fail to have them engage each other or their toxic environment.

But the book quickly advances from these static vignettes. Working in vivid but flatfooted and uncertain prose that improves measurably as the book moves along, Mr. Bogosian sets his malcontents in motion toward one another. The result is wonderfully cinematic. In Hollywood, you would say it's Magnolia meets Natural Born Killers meets Die Hard . In a shopping mall!

The suburban mall is an unholy place, and Mr. Bogosian brims with revulsion for it. In general: "Scented candle shops, lingerie shops, hot cookie shops, Disney shops–inhuman crap for the masses." In a bookstore: " South Park T-shirts and posters, novelties in mesh bags, coffee-table books on gardening or the castles of Scotland, greeting cards, remainders stacked and stickered with large red sale tags, out-of-date semierotic bikini calendars, cute dog calendars, Filofax inserts, pencils and pens, jigsaw puzzles, incense, candles, posters of teen idols. No books." (You bet, though, that you'd find Steve Martin's new novel in such a bookstore, which is one of the reasons you doubt it's a real book.)

Mall goes astray when Mr. Bogosian attempts to portray two characters not consumed by their vices: a noble black security guard with a past and a teenager who likes to read Hermann Hesse. The problem is that the author likes them, and the kindly Bogosian is not the best Bogosian.

The teenager, Jeff, seems to be a stand-in for young Eric Bogosian, who grew up in Woburn, Mass., and wasted his youth at the Burlington Mall. There is a similar character, also named Jeff, in his play subUrbia . Mr. Bogosian, who is a poet of drugs, a lucid William Burroughs, is particularly good at rendering Jeff's acid-trip reflections.

The violence in Mall escalates to Schwarzeneggerian levels. Mr. Bogosian's loving and not especially ironic descriptions of guns and ammunition are a little disturbing, which is probably what the author intends. The shootouts and massacres are easy to follow; if the book were a movie, you would say the action was well-directed. Mall is as exciting and disturbing as Pulp Fiction was the first time you saw it.

An upscale department store is the backdrop for many scenes in Shopgirl , but there's no gunplay, sadly, and it's neither exciting nor disturbing. Steve Martin is an aesthete who runs cool where Eric Bogosian runs hot. Mr. Martin's prose is refined and controlled, and it yields some lovely sentences. But it's also dotted with self-conscious misfires. It reads like the work of an autodidact.

Shopgirl is meant to be a satire, I suppose, but it is a flaccid and all-too-sympathetic satire, a satire that celebrates Los Angeles even as it pokes fun at it. It reminds me in this respect of Mr. Martin's film L.A. Story .

The shopgirl in question is Mirabelle, who works in the glove department at Neiman's, and if she despairs it is not because of the emptiness of the consumer culture. She likes objects well enough. But she pines for love. She is plain and helpless, and in making her the center of his book Mr. Martin has set himself a challenge he cannot meet. Mirabelle is as unengaging as Mr. Martin says she is.

Mirabelle meets a millionaire whom Mr. Martin irritatingly keeps referring to as "Mr. Ray Porter" or "Mr. Porter." Porter is a classy womanizer who seduces Mirabelle and, for no good reason, ends up falling for her.

Luxury items and seduction are the main themes here. Mr. Martin, a dandy, knows his way around fancy clothes. His affectionate and detailed descriptions of them put you in mind of Bret Easton Ellis and, as in Mr. Ellis' work, there are problems of perspective and tone.

Mr. Martin also seems to know his way around seduction–at least he writes about affairs as a tour guide might write about landmarks. His asides on the subject violate the novelist's show-don't-tell rule repeatedly, fundamentally and flagrantly. One wonders whether Mr. Martin has gone woozy in his liberation from the screenwriter's general inability to comment directly on the action in a film. These asides are to the narrative what voice-overs are to film. They suggest a godlike Steve Martin gazing down with pity on the puny creatures he has casually invented.

Here is an example: "Mirabelle is not sophisticated enough to understand what is happening to her, and Ray Porter is not sophisticated enough to know what he is doing to her. She is falling in love, and she fully expects her love to be returned once Mr. Porter comes to his senses." Here's more, from near the end: "She has learned that her body is precious and it mustn't be offered carelessly ever again, as it holds a direct connection to her heart."

The author takes up the issue of Mirabelle's poverty. It's not clear whether Mr. Martin's fascination with people who must think before they pay $3.50 and a tip to use valet parking is sympathetic or something else, but he returns to the impossibility of living on a shopgirl's wages again and again. I guess we should be glad for this social realism.

Except for a few jokey asides consistent with the characters' thoughts, Shopgirl does not mean to be funny, and that may disappoint some readers. (You would think, though, that they would be disappointed in Mr. Martin's New Yorker casuals too, which differ in the funniness department only in aspiration.)

One likes a novel to end quietly, with a kind of sad finality. If it's any good at all, you linger in that little echo of mortality for a moment before moving on to the next thing.

These two books conclude with acknowledgments, and both authors thank a brace of agents. It's like watching the credits roll at the end of a movie; it reminds you how easy it is for dabblers to lose their way. You forgive Mr. Bogosian his missteps, because on the whole his book works; it grabs you. Mr. Martin's featherweight exercise is another matter.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

"TK," to a journalist, means "to come." It's a placeholder in draft copy for something to be added later.

The first page of my review copy of Richard Stengel's history of flattery says "Acknowledgments TK," the second says "Dedication TK." In other words, Mr. Stengel has prepared an entertaining and at times surprisingly serious and disturbing meditation on flattery, but he declines to show reviewers how he himself does the deed.

I'm guessing the acknowledgments will include people at The New Yorker , to which he contributes; people at Time , where he's now managing editor of the magazine's Web site; Bill Bradley, for whom he was a campaign speech writer; and Nelson Mandela, whose 1994 autobiography Mr. Stengel worked on.

Perhaps he will acknowledge that Mr. Mandela, of all people, may have been the inspiration for the book. That's a name you have to drop lightly, but Mr. Stengel knows how to strike the right affectionate but dispassionate note. Last year, he told Frontline that Mr. Mandela is "incredibly susceptible to flattery and compliments … It's a kind of unerring missile into him, to flatter him, because it confirms in a way his sense of self-esteem. So he's a master of using it and he is also disarmed by it at the same time." That comment nicely captures Mr. Stengel's subtle understanding of the flattery power dynamic.

The absence of acknowledgments may be just as well, as any discussion of flattery, much less a review of a discussion of flattery, inexorably tends toward the meta, and You're Too Kind is more straightforward than that. Though it's not in any important sense a manual, Mr. Stengel does end his book with an epilogue called "How to Flatter Without Getting Caught," which consists of a series of tips and examples. Let's give them a test drive.

Be specific . Mr. Stengel starts his book by sketching out two fascinating and fundamental propositions about flattery, and they allow him to build a work that, while lively to the point of occasional glibness, is analytically penetrating and theoretically sound. He offers a deft definition. Flattery is, he says, not just any praise and not generally empty or false praise. It is "strategic praise, praise with a purpose." Flattery is not about lying but about currying favor, which is often best accomplished by giving the object of the flattery a carefully marshaled, casually presented and unexpected but truthful compliment. (This definition is a kind of flipside to Alan Bennett's remark about false modesty: "All modesty is false," he said. "Otherwise it's not modesty.")

Mr. Stengel's second insight, echoing what he said elsewhere about Mr. Mandela, is that flattery is about status, not substance. He quotes, in succession, George Bernard Shaw and Ralph Waldo Emerson on this point. Shaw: "What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering." Emerson: "We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted." (The book brims with quotations. They are good quotations, too, but their quantity is such that you sometimes think you've stumbled into the schmooze section of Bartlett's .)

Be a little esoteric . This second point provides the book's backbone. It allows Mr. Stengel to march through recorded history making broad comments about social hierarchy that are not always grounded in a discussion of flattery as such. Or, put another way, the explanatory force of Mr. Stengel's argument builds so furiously–from flattery as strategic praise, to all praise as purposeful, to all linguistic interaction as reflective of social hierarchy–that, finally, he seems to explain all of human social history by reference to self-promotion. He may have spent too much time in Manhattan.

You're Too Kind shares its unified-theory-of-everything quality with The Moral Animal , Robert Wright's explanation of all human activity as the struggle for genetic immortality, which Mr. Stengel discusses at length. In both books, the reader swims against powerful currents of theory, striving all the while to identify counterexamples and alternative explanations–which actually makes for an engaging reading experience.

Mix a little bitter in with the sweet . The earliest and brainiest parts of You're Too Kind are quite powerful. The concluding chapters, too–starting with a very good discussion of the central role Dale Carnegie continues to play in the American conception of success–have great force.

But the middle of the book is a long historical slog. My heart sank as it became clear that Mr. Stengel intended to work his way through the Great Books to illuminate his theme. This part has many of the qualities of a pretty good undergraduate essay in a required class at Columbia University or the University of Chicago. The student has picked an original and entertaining theme, but as he runs through the texts at hand it turns out that there is neither quite enough to say nor a sufficiently interesting or coherent thesis. To make up the required number of pages, the student quotes abundantly, digressing, doubling back, padding. There's a lot of that in You're Too Kind . It's not that the writing or thinking is anything like bad; it's just that there is a serious and powerful essay lurking just underneath this somewhat flabby book.

That's still something. Tell someone you're writing a book on flattery at a cocktail party, and the reaction will inevitably be, "What a great idea!" But then try to say something worthwhile about flattery and keep it going for nearly 300 pages–a different affair entirely. (We can be thankful that Mr. Stengel never made good on his proposal, reported in The New York Times in 1992, to write "a social history of sneakers in America." It followed a Styles of The Times piece on the significance of the Birkenstock sandal. "Call it déjà shoe," he wrote.)

Find something you really do like . The book concludes with an excellent discussion of "the capitals of modern flattery," which Mr. Stengel identifies as Washington and Hollywood. Mr. Stengel talks about the relationships between journalists and their subjects in both places, and he knows what he's talking about. In Washington, there is "a mutual saving of face" between reporters and politicians. "It works like this: the journalist never writes or says what he really knows about the subject, perhaps how dumb, assholic or scary the politician is; and the politician never lets on how little the journalist knows about what he or she is writing about."

In Hollywood, it's even worse. "The celebrity profile," he observes, "is a debased form; it is flattering by its very nature, even when the writer thinks he's being objective or even harsh." He goes on to discuss what he calls "celebrityophilia" with really bracing disdain. This section of the book is a nice complement to the classic Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity by Mr. Stengel's Time colleague Richard Schickel.

The fetishization of celebrity and power, and the "rampant insincere flattery" it breeds are no good, of course. But the opposite's no better: "Transparency is not the thing that will make society more decent and livable," Mr. Stengel writes. There is, he tells us–citing (afraid so) Hegel–a "heroism of flattery" that we achieve only once we've recognized "the essential falseness of society." Mr. Stengel advocates a middle ground; he believes in dispensing controlled doses of flattery, for "compassion and convenience," for "social amelioration." But Hegel was onto something too. We live in an age of superheroes.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times .

Rod Smolla is a turncoat. A respected First Amendment scholar and author, he violated the fundamental taboo of the media law bar–never work for the enemy–and sued the publisher of a book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors . This caused Mr. Smolla to be expelled, metaphorically speaking, from the little guild of media lawyers (of which I should say I am a member, as a lawyer at The New York Times ). Martin Garbus suffered a similar fate when he dared to sue the Daily News and Mike McAlary on behalf of a woman whom Mr. McAlary had accused of fabricating her own rape.

It is not a little ironic that a group of lawyers devoted to free speech should get so prickly about dissent, particularly where the cases aren't easy ones. To this reader, then, Rod Smolla's book is a fascinating examination of his struggle to answer the accusation that he abandoned principle for money.

Other readers will see other things in Deliberate Intent , which is in large part an account of a horrible crime and its aftermath, in juiced-up true-crime prose. Here are the barebones:In1992,amannamed Lawrence Horn hired a hit man to kill his ex-wife, his 8-year-old son and a nurse–the idea was to collect an insurance settlement. The murderer, who used methods suggested by Hit Man , got the death penalty; Mr. Horn was sentenced to life in prison.

Mr. Smolla also offers up well-presented litigation war stories in the style of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action . And there are hoked-up scenes in which Mr. Smolla discusses First Amendment doctrine with various articulate students, who spout eloquent yards of dialectical argument. Mr. Smolla probably thought that dramatizing all this doctrine would make it more palatable to the general reader. The effect, though, is to cheapen it.

Too bad, because Mr. Smolla is one of our most readable scholars of First Amendment law. He is the author–as Rodney A. Smolla, not racy Rod Smolla–of an important work of theory, Free Speech in an Open Society , and two solid accounts of big First Amendment cases. His views in these books are well within the mainstream, with perhaps some added emphasis on the value of protecting speech for its self-affirming qualities (as opposed to emphasis on the marketplace of ideas or the importance of free speech to self-governance). Mr. Smolla has a tendency to get a little mushy and New Agey: "[F]reedom to speak without restraint provides the speaker with an inner satisfaction and realization of self-identity essential to individual fulfillment."

What caused a party-line man like Mr. Smolla to take this case? He says it was mainly outrage and a "moral bond" with the families of the murder victims–the aggrieved parties who hired him to bring suit. He also concedes, with almost too much candor, that he was "financially destitute," maxed out on his credit cards, and "the idea of making some money on a case was attractive." The idea seems to have paid off: The case was recently settled, and Mr. Smolla presumably took a share of what the parties called a "multimillion-dollar settlement." Mr. Smolla may also expect to make a couple of bucks from DeliberateIntent ,the marketing and mock-pulp presentation of which arenotwithout,uh, mercenaryaspects. The publisher of Hit Man ,ontheother hand,wasmadeto withdraw the book.

In another fit of candor, Mr. Smolla tells us he took the case before he really had a theory. "But I knew in my heart," he writes, "that the First Amendment simply could not plausibly be interpreted to protect a book like Hit Man ." Well, it's pretty clear that James Perry, whom Mr. Horn hired to kill three people, followed closely the instructions in Hit Man : There was his choice of weapon, the home-made silencer, the drilled-out serial number on the gun–and the fact that he shot his victims through the eyes at close but not point-blank range (minimizes the blood spatter on your clothes). It's also clear that the publisher of Hit Man , Paladin Press, cranks out a vast array of similarly disturbing books.

But different readers saw different things in Hit Man . Scholars, criminologists and law enforcement officials read it to learn about criminals and their methods, and crime buffs who get off on this sort of stuff read it for pleasure. The book itself, which was first published in 1983, sent off mixed signals. Aspects of it, including its lurid cover and overheated tone, were ripe if not comic. It was written by a woman who submitted it to the publisherasa work of fiction.

Who is to say thatonebook leads inexorably to crime while another does not? What is the principle that allows the "multimillion-dollar"punishment of the publisher of Hit Man while Bret Easton Ellis mingles at Moomba?

The Sorrows of Young Werther indisputablyencouragedany number of young men to kill themselves, the novel lying open by the dead body. It was for a time widely banned. Are we really prepared to ban Goethe? Or does the question turn on esthetic merit? On the publisher? The presentation? The context? The intent of the author or publisher? Perhaps Oscar Wilde's aphorism makes for sound legal principle: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

There will always be a point at which the heartless elegance of pure theory must give way to palpable human suffering and sadness, but where is that point? When Yale Law professor Alexander Bickel, a giant of First Amendment law, argued the Pentagon Papers case for The New York Times , he was pressed repeatedly about whether the paper could be stopped from publishing the papers if it were certain that 100 American soldiers would die as a result. He ducked; he weaved. But finally he said: "I am afraid that my inclinations to humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment." He insisted, though, that the link between publication and death must be "obvious, direct, immediate."

That would seem to be the right answer, and if that standard had been applied in Mr. Smolla's case, Hit Man would have escaped unscathed. Mr. Smolla convinced an appellate court that a substantially lower standard was required. With this, he did grave damage to the cause of free speech.

It has long been thought by most First Amendment lawyers, based on the leading Supreme Court case, that "imminence" was required before inciting speech could be subjected to liability–the bad act must closely follow the bad speech. Mr. Smolla himself has written that speech should not be punished "because of the reactive disturbances it causes … at some indeterminate future time." The appellate court, with an assist from the Clinton Justice Department, agreed with Mr. Smolla's revised view and declared that timing is irrelevant. Only the words themselves, the acts they encouraged and the publisher's intent matter. The appellate court reversed the decision of a lower court that had dismissed the case before trial. And the prospect of a jury trial in the wake of the Littleton, Colo., massacre pushed the publisher to settle.

The Hit Man decision has already, Mr. Smolla sheepishly admits, wreaked some havoc. A Louisiana court has foolishly allowed a case involving allegations of copycat killings suggested by the movie Natural Born Killers to go forward, based in large part on the precedent Mr. Smolla helped establish.

Mr. Smolla was lucky in the appellate judges he drew. The author of the decision, J. Michael Luttig, had suffered a ghastly tragedy himself. His father was killed in a carjacking. This caused Judge Luttig, understandably, to read Hit Man with particular loathing. Mr. Smolla writes that the lower court judge who dismissed the case "never really grasped [ Hit Man 's] essence." Judge Luttig read it as a pernicious training manual, and Mr. Smolla approves: "That's how it read to someone whose own life had been touched by violence."

Mr. Smolla doesn't seem to realize he's conceding that the case turned on individual reading experiences, which surely cannot be the basis for a neutral legal principle.

Different readers will take away different things from Mr. Smolla's book. Different readers took away different things from Hit Man . I would urge you to judge the latter book for yourself, but you cannot. Rod Smolla has suppressed it.

Now here is an unpromising project: "a novel based on the life of Senator Joe McCarthy." I suppose we should be grateful it's not an opera or epic poem.

William F. Buckley Jr. has been defending Joseph McCarthy since at least 1953, when he and L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies . But he has always played it pretty straight with the basic facts. His new book is therefore an adequate introduction to the rise and fall of the Wisconsin senator who for a few years in the early 1950's dominated the national agenda with fantastic, paranoid and empty claims of massive Communist infiltration of the Government. Mr. Buckley is particularly good on McCarthy's fall, which he reductively but entertainingly attributes to the choice of Roy Cohn for a lawyer and President Eisenhower for an enemy.

While not unsympathetic to his subject, Mr. Buckley presents plenty of evidence that McCarthy was a mean, uneducated, reckless political hack and opportunist. But Mr. Buckley does not bring the man to life, and we are left more or less with the image we came in with: the ranting, the five o'clock shadow, the booze. Twice Mr. Buckley tells us that the senator liked to barbecue. We see him "cooking his beloved steaks" and then, later, "cooking a steak (on his beloved outdoor grill)." Point taken: The man loved red meat.

About half of The Redhunter is devoted to an invented narrative that only partly intersects with the McCarthy story. The players in this fictive drama are Harry Bontecou, an aide to McCarthy, and Alex Herrendon, a British diplomat and Soviet spy. Bontecou is plainly a surrogate for the young Mr. Buckley. Bontecou is thoughtful and decent in all the ways that McCarthy is not, and so Bontecou must struggle with and reject McCarthy as a father figure. This part is only dull. Book-reviewing convention forbids me from telling you that the novel's climax is built around the revelation that the spy Herrendon turns out to be–paging Luke Skywalker–Bontecou's father. Everything about this twist is dreadful at every level, including rudimentary craft. I'm cringing now, just thinking about it.

The pacing and structure of both parts of the book owe something to the sort of thriller you grab at the airport when you are short on time and self-respect. The chapters are slight and brisk, flitting from place to place and forward and backward in time. They all have literal titles, some of them goofy and amusing; one I liked in particular was "Eisenhower, in the Oval Office, is irked."

The further Mr. Buckley strays from the historical record, the less convincing the novel is, as fiction or otherwise. There are some unintentionally comic scenes between McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover that take place in a spyproof electronic "bubble" straight out of Get Smart . In one, Hoover reveals to McCarthy the existence of the Venona project, which decrypted Soviet cable traffic. (The Venona files, which support the cases against Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, were not publicly revealed until 1995.) Mr. Buckley has Hoover telling McCarthy that only six people know about the project. It is preposterous to suggest that the most secretive of men would have revealed the existence of Venona to the most reckless of men.

On the bright side, a few scenes with Whittaker Chambers, with whom the young Mr. Buckley was close, ring quite true. If Mr. Buckley only hints at Chambers' profound reservations about McCarthy, he works hard to convey his oracular quality. Mr. Buckley quotes (or perhaps mimics) several paragraph-long passages from letters Chambers supposedly wrote to the fictional Bontecou. The quality of both the prose and the observation in these passages is extraordinary. The letters echo some of what Chambers wrote to Mr. Buckley at the time, correspondence quoted in Sam Tanenhaus' excellent Whittaker Chambers: A Biography . (Just to bring things full circle, Mr. Tanenhaus is at work on a biography of Mr. Buckley.)

Then there are the passages of expository dialogue: One character explains to another matters well known to both, all for the reader's benefit. Here's a particularly dizzy patch. A Columbia professor named Willmoore Sherrill (a nod to Mr. Buckley's favorite Yale professor, Willmoore Kendall) is addressing Bontecou, a former student and now a McCarthy aide: "Your boss McCarthy is struggling to validate his basic case made before the Tydings Committee. Something called the Gillette-Monroney Committee is established, to review your boss McCarthy's conduct during the Tydings campaign. One of the senators who will decide his fate will be Senator Hennings. So what does he ask Hennings to do? To disqualify himself from the Gillette committee. Why? Because Hennings' old law firm in St. Louis represents the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . So? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized against the Smith Act and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has attacked–your boss McCarthy … 'along the same lines followed by the Daily Worker ,' to use McCarthy's language."

This is not dialogue in any conventional sense. (It may have a future as libretto, though.)

The larger issues of the McCarthy era should still trouble and engage us. There can be little doubt now that the young Mr. Buckley, his mentors and coterie were right about the evil of communism as such, and of its foreign manifestations. Mr. Buckley makes this case with some overkill and triumphalism, but it is true that the lefty and intellectual classes were shamefully slow to recognize what ought to have been plain at the time.

What about the domestic front of the Cold War? There were indeed actual Soviet spies in our midst. They should have been and often were dealt with harshly. That is a different matter from persecuting people who held and expressed foolish views, even when the views as expressed may have helped the enemy. Mr. Buckley never quite says so, but he plainly approves of Senator McCarthy's tactics, or at least the broad outlines of his basic approach. But McCarthy was incapable of drawing distinctions between words and deeds, and Mr. Buckley, who should know better, calls and raises.

His whole McCarthy apologia starts with what Mr. Buckley himself recognizes is "rhetorical shuffling." McCarthy repeatedly said–lied–that he held in his hand lists of communists in the State Department, or wherever. Mr. Buckley would like us to believe that what he meant was different: that there were, in an ungainly phrase repeated throughout the book, "loyalty/security risks" within the Government.

The rhetorical shuffle is supposed to take care of one problem, that McCarthy never found any communists. Mr. Buckley, through Bontecou, points to evidence from an unnamed F.B.I. agent against one "Edward G. Posniak, a State Department economist." He cites a date and a page of the Congressional Record. He tells us that we must accept this as synecdoche–the part representing the whole. Sorry, Mr. Buckley, we're in a no-trope zone here.

But the shuffle also creates a problem. Mr. Buckley seriously contends that having leftish views, belonging to what used to be called progressive organizations,voting for HenryWallace,or just beingincompetent,oughttohave been a firingoffense,on "loyalty/security" grounds, from a Government job. In the 1950's, this argument was pernicious but perhaps understandable given the stakes. Today it is offensive.

Mr. Buckley is disdainful of those who, in Bontecou's words, "bring up the First Amendment and stroke that violin good and hard." Me, I'd strike up the whole Bill of Rights band. The correct lesson to draw from the Cold War at home is that our democracy was strengthened by its general refusal to adopt the enemy's treatment of its citizens.